In order to help focus your efforts on the tasks that are most likely to improve the performance and scalability of your site, I’ve found that it’s useful to establish a rough sense of the target performance and scalability of your site.
I’ve never seen a formal partitioning along these lines, so I came up with my own system that I call leagues:
| League | Description |
| LG-1 | Shared hosting. You don’t have direct control of the server, and you share it with other sites. |
| LG-2 | Dedicated server, single machine. You have full control over the server. The website, database and optionally SSAS run on the same machine, possibly along with other applications. |
| LG-3 | Two servers. Your website runs on one, and your database and SSAS run on the other. |
| LG-4 | Two or more web servers, with one database server. The web servers run in a load-balanced configuration, using either NLB or a hardware load balancer. |
| LG-5 | Two or more web servers, with one high-availability database, using either clustering or mirroring. |
| LG-6 | Two or more web servers, with multiple partitioned databases, some or all of which are highly available. The partitioned databases might include support for things like logging or read-only databases. |
| LG-7 | Two or more web servers, with multiple partitioned high-availability databases and multiple physical locations that you manage. The multiple locations might be for disaster failover, global load balancing, etc. |